Breadcrumb

WorldType®.

Making your devices multilingual is a critical part of entering other markets. In complex scripts, the characters’ shapes, positions and orders change, depending on the context. With so many characters to accommodate, you can quickly see memory disappear—and a loss of speed that customers will notice.

Get started

Ready to get started with your embedded type transformation? Fill out our form and a member of our team will get back to you.

Our WorldType portfolio is a fully Unicode-compliant technology that allow you to take these complexities in stride. WorldType® Layout Engine™ is a modular software library for composing, positioning and rendering text in multiple languages. WorldType® Shaper™ enables intelligent character shaping and bi-directional reordering for non-Latin scripts.

Individually and together, WorldType can help you reduce development time and costs to bring your device to market – and meet the demands of a global market. What’s more, it is easily integrated into existing technologies, so there’s no need to rebuild your current layout and rendering solutions.

Keep your brand consistent worldwide.

Different languages can present a world of challenges. Our software can help.

Complex scripts and bi-directional text

Composes, positions and renders complex and bi-directional scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean as well as Hebrew and Arabic.

Line break control

Control both explicit line-breaks (such as returns and breaks following punctuation) and specialized line-breaks required by specific languages.

White space

Determine the use of white spaces following line-breaks, alignment of text, indentations and ellipses to truncate text blocks that overrun their containers.

Character substitution

Manages contextual or iconic replacements for common character combinations – such as emoticons – or character positions.

Truncation support

Gives control in development for how text blocks exceeding the text container behave, whether truncated with an ellipsis (…) or other symbols.

Cursor positioning

Enhanced flexibility that puts extra control in the hands of developers with select cursor movement and positioning functions.

Flexible operation modes

Optimize performance and accommodate varying layout needs – from the most advanced Container-based mode for large quantities of text; to the high-customization Line-based mode; and the efficient String-based mode primarily for shorter blocks of text.

Our global team of engineers is available to help compress large font files or link multiple languages in one font file and serve them more efficiently. Which means there’s no need to produce multiple language versions of the same product. Our Monotype Spark™ solution helps enable these services by delivering full-quality, scalable fonts with a run-time RAM footprint as low as 20kb. Learn more about memory efficiency solutions for international products.

The languages of the world are rich with nuances and subtle differences concerning the presentation of text. In complex scripts such as Arabic, Devanagari and Thai, for example, character shape, position and order change, depending on the context. Your existing font rendering, layout and management technologies will support Latin-based languages. But they may not be able to carry out the selection, combining and reordering of glyphs demanded by complex non-Latin scripts.

Certain languages need special handling. In Thai, for example, there are no spaces in text, which means layout engines need an in-built Thai dictionary to help work out the placement of line-breaks. Our WorldType Layout Engine can control both explicit line-breaks (such as returns and breaks following punctuation) and specialized line-breaks required by specific languages, such as those needed in Thai. Other features allow the control of white spaces following line-breaks, alignment of text, indentations and ellipses to truncate text blocks that overrun their containers.

We have an international team of type designers who can support you in taking your brand to new parts of the world, and resolve the specific technical challenges you face in presenting text consistently across platforms and languages. If a certain language isn’t catered for by an existing font, for example, our designers can create the extra characters and alphabets needed. The team includes specialists in Arabic, Cyrillic and Indic languages, Greek and Japanese. We regularly collaborate with experts in other writing systems, too, to help brands reach a global audience. Learn more about custom typeface design.

WorldType Shaper features

Accommodate world languages with shaping and bidi support

Glyph specification allows for simpler intelligent shaping of complex scripts based on the surrounding characters

Simple integration utilizing only a small number of APIs

Supports legacy technology, eliminating the need to re-architect the text technologies in your current generation of devices